Does anyone know whether or not the “exploding cigar” assassination plot was an actual CIA budget busting effort that never left the lab or simply a comedic jab at the government’s neverending loathing of Fidel Castro?  According to a recent BBC web-news posting it’s gospel but then again no one bothered to claim authorship of said article so my trust isn’t pouring out all down my pants and filling my shoes with the gushy love of humanity juice… What’s more important to me is that exploding cigars make as much sense as any of the popular American opinions and responses to Cuba over the long tenure of Castro.

Little Havana sure is boiling over at the news of Castro’s temporary relinquishment of power and the White House, or at least members of congress haven’t been shy about expressing the same amount of unbridled greed and excitement as pampered little rich kids on Christmas Eve… Everyone hoped Castro was dead, his nearly 80 year old body quitting under the knife while Cuban surgeons trolled through his intestines… If you were a farmer across the Carribean in any other nation you probably would have died but Cuba has Latin America’s best health care system and it’s probably better than what many uninsured Americans manage to scrounge between emergency rooms and free clinics and helpful little pamphlets with self-evaluation guides… Does this look cancerous to you?

Those more on the left of the political spectrum seem to have a soft spot for Cuba– Jimmy Carter even went and smoked cigars with Castro… Yes, the country has a great health care system (triumphed by the WHO) and better literacy rates than Louisiana (my guess) yet also has more political prisoners than those rotting across the razor wire at Guantanemo and isn’t too shy about executing them periodically… Not political prisoners in the sense that Timothy McVey would be considered one- that is to say no one’s blowing up government buildings– but political prisoners in the sense that writing newspaper articles critical of the Cuban government will very easily wind you up in prison for twenty years… The left seems willing to overlook such pesky little dark spots on the Carribean’s great social experiment and besides, maybe these authors, professors, scientists and other guttersnipes were funded by the CIA and Castro has every right to protect himself… Meanwhile people have no qualms about not buying Chinese goods, or at least they like to say that but then find a really good deal down at Target and who’s got time to check every tag in the store seeing where things are made?

Then you have people on the right side of the political spectrum who think that the Chinese are alright if you don’t look too carefully at their willingness to imprison monks, pro-democracy pamphlet writers and drive over students with tanks… Actually even the left doesn’t mind that so much if US-China trade relations are any indication… We trade with China and we’ve pressured most of the white world into not even having regular diplomatic ties with Cuba…

The history of Cuba and America maybe sheds a little light on why the US government still views an isolated pocket of totalitarianism as such a big deal… Through-out the cold war Cuba was the USSR; before the government privatized industry and expelled US business interests no one gave a shit about Fidel and his Pancho Che galavanting about the Americas.  The US didn’t offer any notable support to Batista when, after repeated attempts, he was forced to abandon Havana to the revolution, nor was the US terribly concerned when Cuba began to support (failed) insurgencies in Panama, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Pataguay or Guatamala… No one cared when the Castro regime went about cleaning house of old Batista supporters and executing over 200 people within the first year of the new order… Sure, Batista wasn’t a nice guy but US foreign policy, expecially in Latin America, likes the bad guys…

But a year after privatization and a declaration of communism Kennedy was in office and three months after he took oath the US conned a bunch of exiles into invading– the Bay of Pigs.  Frankly even then the US wasn’t too concerned about Castro since we couldn’t even be bothered to follow through on any support and left the invasion force to die on the beach… It’s an old trick we, decades later, pulled a couple of times on the Kurds when we weren’t really too concerned about Sadaam Hussein…

It took the Cuban Missle Crisis and further buddying up to the Soviet Union to get America really aggressive about Cuba and suddenly there’s a worldwide trade embargo (world being not the communists who like to send starving children rifles) and posturing and exiles en masse to Havana… If you bucked the embargo, like Allende tried to do, Pinochet magically appears on your doorstep and you, eh, commit suicide. You can’t even blame Che for any of this since he was in Angola at the time saving the Marxists from the, well, no, they all died too…

You’d expect that, with the decline of the USSR and a simmering down of the cold war that the US would open, as it did with other communist countries (of economic consequence, not Vietnam or anything) new dialogue and get filmed shaking hands for television… The Russian invasion of Afghanistan didn’t merit as much intervention as socialists coming to power in Grenada– maybe the Cuban soldiers fighting alongside the revolutionary army got Castro excluded from the love-fest…

But then the wall came down and the Russians decided to stop pretending and concentrated power amongst the rich in a capitalist fashion instead of a communist one and every former communist nation, even Vietnam, is able to once again have their markets flooded with American business investments… Except Cuba, which has absolutely no way of being a menace to anyone but Cubans… Is there even a navy? I think Texas is safe…

So the liberals can’t be bothered to keep in mind human rights and the conservatives (who ignore that readily) can’t be bothered to ignore the sucesses of Cuba and the fact that the chessboard’s not even a chessboard anymore, it’s a fucking dartboard… Cuba receives less respect as a nation than any of the axis of evil countries Bush keeps jabbering about when he’s not down in Little Havana prepping exile community leaders for the great opening of Cuba to freedom and McDonald’s and some fancy hotels… According to those back on the island Miami business interests have started sniffing around waiting for Castro to croak…

So maybe exploding cigars makes more sense than anything the US has ever thought of in regards to Cuba… You used to be able to buy them from the back pages of Boy’s Life…